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Annotated Reference Guide to Collectible Books

Harrison, Jim

Jim Harrison is the sort of writer who manages to cross genre boundaries and mediums as if they didn’t exist at all, and making one feel as though they were all a part of a much bigger plan all along. In this way we can see how his first book Wolf: A False Memoir about a man tracking a wolf in the northern territories is linked, stylistically, to the animalistic, emotional Wolf – the screenplay featuring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer about a werewolf – and then also to True North, or his poetry chapbooks Walking, or The Theory and Practice of Rivers. All of his works feature a strand of the New England transcendentalist tradition – that wanderlust for the lost American wilderness, the finding of oneself through stepping outside of societal norms, only to find a simpler, shared (animal?) humanity lying beyond.

It may come as no surprise then, that Jim Harrison is also the author of the interlocking stories of Legends of the Fall – which later became a powerful film about Indigenous American land rights.
For a collector, Jim Harrison offers a unique opportunity to collect a still-living author, and one who is still very widely regarded (he won a Grammy for his scriptwriting on the film Wolf!). His early poetry collections, if signed and in good condition, can be as valuable as a two to three thousand US dollars – a very good feat for a still living author!

A very worthwhile collection might include the collected stories of Legends of the Fall (Delacourte Press, 1979) – only one of which -- Revenge -- formed the main body of the film. A signed copy of the collected four stories in first edition would cost somewhere between six hundred and eight hundred dollars.
However, a much more interesting item to add to a collection might be Harrison’s The Raw and the Cooked, his non-fiction accounts of adventures with food by Dim Grey Bar Press (1992). The true first limited edition is only one of twenty-six hand-lettered copies, each with hand-made paper supposedly infused with garlic and herbs! One of these twenty-six volumes can be found for somewhere in the region of seven to nine hundred US dollars.

ORR, Gregg. Jim Harrison. Univ. of Nebraska, Omaha (2009).A COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY; 100 copies; Foreword by Jim Harrison and an introduction by Robert DeMott. Included with tthe limited edition is a signed print by Russell Chatham, Late Afternoon, which was used for the dust jacket in the trade edition. Signed by Orr, Torrey and Harrison.

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